The most detailed and comprehensive treatise on swordsmanship ever written, Gerard Thibault’s Academy of the Sword offers an extraordinary glimpse into a forgotten landscape of ideas, in which Pythagorean sacred geometry illuminated the lethal realities of rapier combat to create one of the Western world’s only thoroughly documented esoteric martial arts. Translated by the widely respected occultist and scholar John Michael Greer, this stunningly illustrated and precisely detailed manual of Renaissance swordsmanship is a triumphant document of Renaissance culture—as well as a practical manual of a martial art that can still be studied and practiced today.

About the Author(s)

Gérard Thibault d'Anvers (ca. 1574–1627) was a Dutch fencing master and author of the 1628 rapier manual Academie de l'Espée ('The Academy of the Sword'). His manual is one of the most detailed and elaborate extant sources on rapier combat, painstakingly utilizing geometry and logic to defend his unorthodox style of swordsmanship.

One of the most widely respected voices in contemporary occult studies, John Michael Greer is the award-winning author of more than fifty books, including The New Encyclopedia of the Occult, The Druidry Handbook, The Celtic Golden Dawn, and Circles of Power: An Introduction to Hermetic Magic. An initiate in Freemasonry, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, Greer served as the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA) for twelve years. He lives in Cumberland, Maryland, an old mill town in the Appalachian mountains of western Maryland, with his wife Sara.

John Michael Greer is also the author of four books on peak oil and the future of industrial society, The Long Descent, The Ecotechnic Future, The Wealth of Nature and Not The Future We Ordered, and also writes the widely cited peak oil blog “The Archdruid Report”.